SOURCE: "Dialectic of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," in William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, pp. 49-56.

In this seminal essay on the contraries, originally published in 1971, Bloom contends that The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is dialectical in both form and content.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell assaults what Blake termed a "cloven fiction" between empirical and a priori procedure in argument. In content, the Marriage compounds ethical and theological "contraries"; in form it mocks the categorical techniques that seek to make the contraries appear as "negations." The unity of the Marriage is in itself dialectical, and cannot be grasped except by the mind in motion, moving between the Blakean contraries of discursive irony and mythical visualization.

Apocalypse is dialectical in the Marriage, as much so as in Shelley's Prometheus or the poems by Yeats written out of A Vision...